The Henry Luce Foundation is delighted to announce four grants awarded through Round Two of the Luce Initiative on Southeast Asia (LuceSEA).

With their interdisciplinary and cross-cutting approaches, these four projects are cultivating expertise and intellectual leadership while helping to shape the future of the academy. They are creating new capacity and resources for work in and on Southeast Asia (SEA) that promises to reinforce existing programs and extend their reach in new directions and to broader publics.

Cornell University — Institutionalizing and Developing the Consortium of Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asian Studies (GETSEA) – a four-year grant of $275,000

GETSEA, whose mission is to enhance graduate education in the study of SEA, will explore ways to share resources, expertise and connections to bridge institutional divides and maximize the reach of faculty in the service of supporting MA and PhD students. The Southeast Asia Program at Cornell will serve as the consortium’s initial host.

Michigan State University — Mekong Culture WELL: Advancing Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies of Water, Ecologies, Land, and Livelihoods Justice along the Mekong – a four-year grant of $1,000,000

Building upon remote sensing, satellite imagery and climate data used to map the impacts of dam construction on watersheds in the Lower Mekong Basin, MSU’s project will bring methods from the social sciences and humanities into conversation with the STEM data to integrate perspectives from indigenous and local communities on the cultural, social, economic and environmental transformations they are experiencing. Planned outcomes include a multilingual website for public engagement, an online repository for interdisciplinary learning tools, and new SEA-focused courses in areas including water security, food security and agriculture, development studies and environmental policy.

University of Hawai’i Foundation — LuceSEA Transitions: Environment, Society, and Change – a five-year grant of $1,000,000

A principal goal of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa/East-West Center project is to build research parity for early career scholars and civil society practitioners in SEA. Collaborating institutions from the U.S. and Asia, coordinated by UHM and EWC, will embed opportunities for the professional development of Southeast Asian colleagues within a cluster of research projects that merge social and environmental sciences to address agrarian and urban transitions across the region. The grant will also enable the creation of new, broadly accessible online curricula and digital resources on SEA.

University of Washington — Tracing Authoritarianism: Linking Southeast Asia with Southeast Asian America Through Archives, Language, and Pedagogy – a four-year grant of $1,000,000

Through the lens of critical archival studies, UW’s project will examine authoritarianism and develop new pedagogies that bridge Asian studies and Ethnic studies to engage SEAsian American audiences. Work with American and SEAsian partners in museum and archival collections will connect heritage communities to their homelands and histories and offer opportunities for empowerment and recovery from acts of violence and appropriation. Grant funds will also seed a tenure track line in the Asian Languages & Literatures Department and fund needed training in SEA librarianship.